Religion As Aesthetic Reflexivity in the Social Experience of Italian Muslim Women

Religion as aesthetic reflexivity in the social experience of Italian Muslim Women

The paper is a contribution to the debate on the social construction of Islam in the Italian context from the point of view of young women of Muslim culture. We observe this process through the lens of their religious path to understand how it is involved in sustaining subjectivation. As an essential component of difference, the notion of subjectivation is central to the contributions of Touraine (see in particular Touraine 1992, 1994) and other scholars of the Centre d'analyse et d'intervention sociologiques - CADIS; it concerns a demand for personal and collective freedom, equally distant from both community and societal adaptation. Subjectivation emphasizes acting in a auto-reflexive way and return to society with creativity in order to contribute to the redefinition of the social space. In the paper religious gender discourse are critically examined in terms of its relevance to Italian Muslim experience in life, cultural tradition, friendship, love, intimacy and recognition of the difference in the public sphere. The empirical data of this work, collected in Rome in 2016, consists of 50 interviews with young women between the ages of 18 and 35, predominantly 2nd or 1.5th generation, and of 2 focus group with 13 women.We have described the main results with special reference to Dubet’s concept of social experience and Lash’s mimetic reflexivity: the young women we interviewed are able to criticize universals by aesthetic detail, in a hermeneutical direction capable of influencing a reflexivity on the forms in which the domination of homogenisation is expressed.